South Korea Develops Its Own Missile Shield

One of the things Americans who keep an eye on military affairs will recall is Bobo the Clown's craven announcement that he would not deploy the anti-ballistic missile system Curious George had promised the Poles to defend against Russian ICBMs and IRBMs, and the hooraw it caused. The South Koreans learned a lesson from this: Put not thy faith in America's defense promises to other nations.

They had already fielded a homegrown variant of the Patriot anti-missile system they developed domestically after the Gulf War, because they knew the nutbars up north were working on missiles that could easily reach anyplace in South Korea. After the Obamination's demonstration of his chocolate eclair backbone, they stepped up work on an anti-ballistic missile system that seems to be a hybrid of Russian and Israeli technology, and they have begun to field it. Good for them.

Here's an article on what they are doing and the approaches they are taking.

In fact, the Russian collaborator, missile-design firm Almaz-Antey, made its own higher-capability version of the Cheongung called the S-350 Vityaz, a battery of which was reported in Syria in September 2017.

A Cheongung battery can hit targets as high as 50,000 to 60,000 feet and defend a 25 miles radius. Each unit includes a truck-mounted multi-function Passive Electronically Scanned Array radar that can track, and identify and generate targeting data for targets within 60 miles. The blocky three-dimensional can track at least 40 contacts at once, and is hardened verses electromagnetic pulses such as could be generated by a nuclear blast.

Firing solutions are relayed from the battery command vehicle to up to six Transporter-Erector-Launcher vehicles with eight missile cells each. The KM-SAM missiles, measuring 275 millimeters in diameter, apparently owe much to the shorter-range 9M96 missiles used in the S-400 SAM system, especially the vertical cold-launch technology.

This means that the missiles are ejected from launch tubes using compressed gas before igniting their rocket motors, giving them better environmental tolerance limits and causing less danger to nearby personnel and terrain during launch.

The KM-SAM uses tiny lateral compressed gas thrusters to orient itself towards a target during liftoff. This saves time and kinetic energy, as the launcher does not need to swivel around and the missile can begin accelerating towards its target immediately at the launch phase. You can see the startling movement of a KM-SAM’s gas thrusters at launch at 1:43 and again at 5:01 in the video below.

Soaring at speeds between Mach 4 and 5, the missiles receive midcourse adjustments from the battery radar, and upon closing within short range of a target, switch to a heat-seeking active homing mode for the kill.

The takeoff thrusters can also assist in making maneuvers during this terminal stage. The agile munitions could prove very difficult to elude. They can pull up to 50 Gs, are resistant to radar jamming and possess a low heat-signature, making them difficult to detect.